Hardware & Devices

I had a problem with my laptop, when i started it, it showed a blue screen and then could not start normally except through safe mode. It is slow and has lost volume. What could be the problem and how do i solve it?

There's a chance the hardware in your computer is bad, in other words, the devices and circuitry inside your computer is probably fried or suffered water damage to the point it's causing serious issues for your system. How long has you since not used it? Did anything happen to it in the past that you may think is causing it a problem now?

What I would do is get a hard drive enclosure for a internal hard drive for a laptop and take all your documents off it and copy it to an external hard drive and then re-image your PC (reinstall Windows) with the internal hard drive in it (after putting your documents in a safe place).

In safe mode look at your system recovery settings and set it to create a full kernel dump when it crashes.

Then go to \system\ and look for memory.dmp

Copy it to another machine and install Windbg and open the dmp file.

Look in the Help and set the symbol path to Microsofts public symbols (search for symsrv in Help) then do an analyze -v and see what it says.

Then google the resultant error message, you could have a dodgy driver, there are plenty about, or it could be bad memory.

If you think you have found a bad driver restart the machine and run Verifier.exe at a command prompt and then set it to specifically check that driver, selecting most of the test options except 'low resource simulation' and the 'force delayed IO' or whatever it is called, reboot into normal mode, and see what happens.

If it blue screens again you *should* get a Verifier BSOD (blue screen of death) that will tell you more about the particular error. Then you can get an updated driver off the net or bitch to the company that made that crappy driver and get them to write you a new one.